ZapDune is a resource management platformer/tower defence hybrid, where your aim is to make your ship survive as long as you can. Jump, hook and recharge turrets to keep your ship safe, while making sure power doesn't run out!
The core concepts (explained in-game, this can be ignored) are: - There are 2 kinds of resources in-game: Power and Scrap. - Power is used by turrets. An unpowered turret is dead. You can get power by collecting batteries spawned by the synthesizer at periodic intervals. Keep collecting them to have a larger power bank! - Scrap is used to speed up battery generation from synthesizers, and to revive unpowered turrets. Scrap is left by dead enemies. - Turrets shoot on their own and lose power continuously even if they are not being attacked. You need to recharge them continuously. For turrets, power = health. - Once all turrets are powered down, enemies start attacking the core. The game is over when the core is destroyed.
Controls: - WASD to move. - Aim with mouse and use Left Mouse Button to hook and pull yourself to a point. Press W/S while hooked to a point to release. - Hold Space to recharge turret - Press Space to revive unpowered turret / boost battery generation on synthesizer. - F1 to toggle fullscreen.
General Tips (things you'll realize while playing anyway): - Boost synthesizers often to generate more batteries. - Scrap goes away after a few seconds, make sure to collect as much as possible for boosting / late-game revivals. - Sometimes it might be better to let some turrets die and camp near specific suitable spots.
More Screenies!
Made by Diptoman Mukherjee (programming / design), Pranjal Bisht (art / level design), Rahul Salim Narayanan (art) and Joel Montpetit (SFX) for #ldjam #ld39
This game looks great! Awesome graphics and mechanics, fluid gameplay! Keep it up! A small feedback: make ESC pause the game, not restart. Lost my progress by mistake. D:
Really amazing art! All that tiny little details in the environment and the character animations are just so good! Gameplay is quite smooth and the mechanics have been implemented nicely. Grappling was probably the most fun part of the game though :3
Wow, seriously fun. Had a great time zipping around, and the graphics were BEAUTIFUL. The mechanic is awesome and totally scalable for something bigger.
Loved the art and music. Game itself was really fun, smooth and enjoyable. One thing that annoyed me was that once the weapon crystal things were down and there was no more currency left to repair them, there wasn't really anything to do but watch the enemies destroy the main thing, I definitely feel this game would benefit a lot from a player weapon of some form. Other than that though, a solid game, ended up lasting for 430.
I had no idea the main thing was on my side. I was trying to attack it but ended up leaving all of my crystals to get destroy. @porkeh I'm under the impression that if you grab batteries you can revive dead crystals. Didn't do me any good though. 213 was my personal best. :D
The movement mechanics are really fun, zipping around the level is a blast. It looks great. The music was over the top for my taste. I wish there were more to do with the movement mechanics - I never felt like I had to do any cool or fast maneuvers to get where I needed to be. Using the grapple to traverse a level with pits and enemies would I think be more fun.
@porkeh 430 is more than my best, so you're alright. ;) That thing about watching the crystal die slowly has been mentioned to me before, we just didn't have any time to properly balance waves so they don't gang up. Wanted to add something to counter it - like a get-out-of-jail card (destroy all enemies with X scraps) but didn't get time. The initial plan had the player attacking with the hook too if it hit an enemy, dropped that because of time too lol. Thanks for playing!
@mrtroy You need scraps to revive dead crystals. I've uploaded a post-jam version with better instructions and not walls of text lol. A good strategy would be to speed up battery generation using scraps as much as possible so you're never out of charge. Thanks for playing!
@narudgi The camera is basically following the mouse with an accel/decel in a fixed area, if that helps. :)
@will-walters Well you could travel outside the ship with the hook, it's faster. ;) Yeah, maybe not the coolest thing, it's not precision platforming hahah. Thanks for playing!
I really like the game, it has a nice feel to it. The platforming can be a little complicated sometimes since you need the grappling hook to reach most platforms but it all plays rather smoothly. The only real issue I encountered was that around 300 points the waves tend to stack together too much making it nearly impossible to keep turrets alive. Still, great accomplishment!
Neat mechanics and very nice graphics. Once you get the hang of it, grappling around is fun! One thing though is that the grappling noise got kind of deafening because sometimes the sound would play a bunch at once which got a little annoying. Otherwise, nice!
I really loved the setting, flying through the skies. The music was a great pick, gave it an epic feel. Gameplay was neat and polished with the grappling mechanics. All in all cool entry, hope you keep working on it!
Awesome graphics and gameplay! However, the movement around the gamefield can be annoying (in some places it's hard to distinguish background from standing platforms, it's hard to get to some places, etc)
Fun and dynamic !! The hook system is really cool ! I think the game needs more actions like construct differents turrets, or traps for ennemis, or shoot on them using right mouse click just to do something more than run, hook, recharge. Good job guys !
I enjoyed this entry! The game looked very nice and the animations were all fluid, but it did get a little busy to look at at times, so perhaps some more work on making the characters and enemies pop would be good. The music was nice, but a little too loud and bombastic for my own personal tastes. The mechanic was simple but it was quite fun running around hectically and fixing up your turrets. For the future I'd say giving the player some more mobility outside of the hook (maybe a double jump) as well as the ability to fend off enemies themselves would be nice. Just my two cents, of course. You did well!
Wow, your game is great! Lovely graphics and music, good gameplay (being a spider man in the sky is fun). The jam version is already well polished. I only scored 351 but I really enjoyed it. Well done!
Superb polish as always. I liked that the basic mechanic had a decently high skill ceiling and you could get better and more efficient with your routes as you kept playing. Atm this has my highest score for audio out of any LD39 game.
Wow, this game's attention to detail is incredible! I love the jumping animation, I can tell that someone put a lot of work into that! I wish fixing the turrets had some kind of audio cue or more obvious visual feedback, because I do it so often. I especially look for when the turret is completely healed up, because that's when I have to stop clicking and start going to the next destination. Speaking of which, minor nit, but I feel like I was spam clicking quite a bit (or spam-pressing in the case of spacebar), and the fact that my click location didn't matter threw me off. I personally would have enjoyed it much more if repairing was automatic when I got near a turret. Don't make me spam click! :triumph:
Great job on making it feel really good to move around! Aside from my muscle memory telling me to use spacebar to jump, moving around was a joy. The level was well-designed such that I had many places to grapple onto. I do wish there were more areas where it actually makes more sense to just jump without using the grappling hook. I like jumping! I want to do it more! But grappling really is the superior movement tactic by far, even though it's less interesting to me than jumping.
The music was good, but maybe a little too intense for me :sweat_smile:
Excellent pixel art. Amazing music and sounds (a bit too loud but good). And one of the best gameplay i've seen during this LD. Really fun to play. I'm really looking for to what it will become in the future. :)
- The controls of this is is excellent - i like how the player is reflected to mirror - sound is good but i felt its not as good as the game is !! - Its really fun to play and very smooth mechanic
First-rate animations, graphics, music etc. Everything feels well-considered and planned, it's a very polished experience. It's an interesting twist on tower defense, and the controls handle very well (I'd like jump to be a separate button from the arrow keys though! :sweat_smile:). Grapple hooks are always fun to play around with, and I'm glad that it's no exception here. It's quite forgiving (in a good way), since I noticed that enemies will always prioritise still-living turrets over the core.
I really liked this overall, great work everyone! :smile:
The presentation overall is great with my only gripe being the low resolution text. The music is fine but, can get a bit repetitive. Once I figured out how to use the grappling hook accurately it was very fun to swing from wall to wall repairing turrets. With such a fun character to control part of me wanted some kind of combat mechanic but it is in no way a flaw. Good job!
Fast paced and hectic once things really get going!
This felt like a very cleanly designed game, it's got everything you need and nothing you don't. It made it easy to get in the flow of things when the enemies started showing up faster. I had trouble keeping up with the enemies, but never felt like I was actually struggling.
I do think some additional challenge could make the game even better, perhaps a new threat you need to prioritize with the existing enemies?
Good job!!! Excellent pacing and very challenging. Very well-thought game design! Great music as well!
The hook was kind of buggy sometimes, it sent me flying outside the level. I'd have liked a way to be safe instead of dying when you fall outside the level.
- Please *opt out* of the Audio category since you used 3rd-party music. From the rules page: "You’re free to use 3rd party Artwork/Music/Audio assets, or assets you previously created, but we ask that you OPT-OUT of the respected voting categories (Graphics, Audio)."
- Seeing sharp crisp pixel art next to blurry antialiased text makes me sad! Please find a pixel-based font and use it :)
- Grappling everywhere was cool, but...somehow didn't feel "right".? Sorry that this is so vague. Perhaps the weird thing was that jumping felt rather useless because you needed to mostly grapple to get anywhere.
- In general I felt like the map was too large to keep track of what was going on, or rather...perhaps everything needed to be more zoomed out. The art that you have is great at the current size, but I believe the gameplay suffers a bit when most of the enemy attacks end up happening off-screen. It felt like the game boiled down to a problem of just trying to run around across the map a bunch.
This is amazing! The art is fantastic, and the music is pretty great as well. The only flaw I found is I think that the grapple is a little to fast. Amazing job guys! This is one of the best Ludum Dare games I have played.
Impressive work! A fresh take on the theme with good level design, sound and cute graphics. Very polished too! Maybe it's just me, but could it be that the grapple sound effect is too loud? Felt a little unpleasant to me, but it's just a minor thing on a great game.
One of the best entrys I've played for now, congrats :)
Saw your post about it on the main page and just had to give it a try! Absolutely love the pixel art graphics! :slight_smile: The gameplay mechanics are also really nice and polished. All in all a fantastic entry, congrats! :smiley:
A cool game indeed. I like how you are frantically running in the whole level to fix stuff where needed. I didn't notice in the beginning thet energy was the "life" of turrets, as it would have made sense to me that it is used to shoot things, this make me wonder about the choice you give to the player with scraps: either you use them to repair the turrets, or to rebuild them... which leads to almost the same thing.
If you wish to continue working on this game, I believe it may need to add new mechanics as the player is only responding to the enemy deeds, and doesn't have much iniative in the action, maybe he could choose to upgrade some of the turrets in certain ways to match certain types of enemies... idk
Lovely art and good audio, maybe a bit loud on everything like most of people have pointed out. Good jod!
Really cool game ! The music fit well with the game, the art is really good and the gameplay is well-thought. The only thing a little odd is that when the core health is going down, we know that we loose. The time between the beginning of the attack of the core and its destruction is useless because we can not revive any turrets. Anyway, that is a good game :)
A small feedback: make ESC pause the game, not restart. Lost my progress by mistake. D: